The latest guest on Ryan Murdock’s Personal Landscapes podcast (and the last for this year) is the archaeologist Mike Pitts, talking about his new book on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, a place synonymous with towering anthropomorphic stone statues, or moai. In Island at the Edge of the World (Bloomsbury, £25), Pitts rejects the legends and “histories” that have grown up around the statues over the past two centuries and offers a new story of how and why the islanders built them.